Production delays have cost CEOs their jobs, parent company EADS billions of dollars, and Airbus the lead in its dogfight with Boeing. Here, Fortune lays out the story

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How the wiring unraveled

There are 348 miles of bundled electrical wiring in each plane. Mechanics spent weeks routing cables through walls and floors, but when it came time to connect one section to
another, the wires literally came up short. That's because engineers in Hamburg were initially drawing on a two-dimensional computer program, while their counterparts in Toulouse
were working in 3-D.